Of Ernest Hemingway’s four wives, Hadley Richardson was the first and perhaps the most loved.

She is the subject of the recent best-selling novel, “The Paris Wife,” written by Paula McLain. A poet as well as a novelist, McLain will be at the Savannah Book Festival on Feb. 16.

Richardson is largely unknown, a woman at the fringes of literary history, with little written about her. “She was a surprise to me,” McLain says. “It never occurred to me to write about a historical figure.

“I had written another novel that had not done well at all that involved two disastrous cousins,” she says. “I didn’t have another book in the hopper. Every idea came up flat.

“Feeling very lost, I picked up Hemingway’s memoir of his early days in Paris, ‘A Moveable Feast,’ and Hadley really captured my imagination.”

Hadley doesn’t appear a lot in the memoir. “Just here and there,” McLain says. “By the end of the book, even though they came to Paris as a love-struck couple, another woman comes along and seduces him.

“At the end of ‘A Moveable Feast,’ Hemingway wrote that he wished he had died before he met anyone but Hadley. What happened to change his emotional trajectory? What was the inside story?”

The questions alone were enough to get McLain going. “I was looking for biographies and found that there was a cache of love letters open to the public,” she says.

“I fell madly in love with her and her letters,” McLain says. “I thought, ‘This is a great idea.’”

Hadley seemed unlikely to marry a giant personality like Hemingway, McLain says. “She was this Midwestern girl from St. Louis, kind of a hothouse flower, and she’s the one who married Ernest Hemingway,” McClain says.

“This quiet Victorian girl gets swept off feet and taken to 1920s Paris. Is there anything more unlikely than that?”

Did either regret the end of their marriage? “I know for a fact she did regret it and did not completely ever get over it,” McLain says.

“She lived much longer than he did. He died in 1961 and she lived until 1987. When he died, biographers were coming and asking her a lot of questions.

“She was known for saying she didn’t know if she could have stayed up with him,” McLain says. “He had a huge personality and he wasn’t a happy person.”

Conducting the required research “was huge,” McLain says. “It probably helped that I didn’t have any idea what I was getting into,” she says.

“I remember how painstaking some of the fact checking was. There are Hemingway fanatics out there who would know if I made a mistake.

“But the story itself, the love story, came so quickly,” McLain says. “I myself was completely swept away.”

Paris in the 1920s is an amazing period in history, McLain says. “It took maybe seven months to get the bare bones of the story and the other layers came two years after that,” she says. “I’ve met people who have been writing the same novel for 20 years.”

Despite the effort, McLain is already working on her next book. “I definitely have the bug now,” she says.

“I think readers love historical fiction. They’re getting a history lesson through the back door. If they learn about history while being swept away by a love story, that’s a plus.”

McLain’s next book will be about Marie Curie, the physicist and chemist who is famous for her pioneering research on radioactivity. She received Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry, becoming the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only woman to win in two fields.

Her achievements include the theory of radioactivity, a term that she coined, and techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes. Curie also discovered two elements, polonium and radium.

“She’s really fascinating,” McLain says. “The science is way over my head, but it seems I like working out of my depth.

“She’s got a great love story, too. She lived a great part of her adult life in Paris.”

McLain received an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan and is the author of two collections of poetry, as well as a memoir, “Like Family,” and a first novel, “A Ticket to Ride.”

At the festival, McLain will discuss the book and sign copies. “I’ve only been in Savannah once,” she says. “It was seven or eight years ago when we took my sister as a surprise for her 40th birthday.

“We had a great, great time, so I’m excited to be back,” McLain says. “That’s why I said yes to doing the book festival.”